Tag: Guided Growth

From buildings to artificial organs, 3D printing has the potential to print almost anything. However, one of the biggest limits of 3D printing is its slow printing speed. The current 3D printing technology prints an item by constructing them layer-by-layer, a process which can take several hours.

A team of researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill recently developed a new method that can reduce the printing process down to minutes.

Tuberculosis might sound like a thing of the past but it is still a serious problem, causing an estimated 1.3 – 1.5 million deaths in 2013 alone. The main root of tuberculosis is infected cattle, which is transferred to humans via consumption of unpasteurized dairy products. However, it has recently been announced that genetic modification allowed scientists to produce cattle resistant to tuberculosis.

“However, while 3D printers are becoming increasingly accessible and capable of rivalling the quality of professional equipment, they are still inherently limited by a small print volume, placing severe constraints on the type and scale of objects we can create.” Says designer Marcelo Coelho. With a very smart construction strategy in mind, Coelho developed together with designer and technologist Skylar Tibbits an algorithmic software named Hyperform.

The algorithm can transforms a needed form – possibly bigger than the printer’s measurement reach – into an origami-like chain structure, which can be unfolded into the bigger final product. Hyperform makes it possible to print bigger forms in a single piece, while the ordinary printers print different parts separately and assemblies them later. “Hyperform encodes assembly information into the actual parts, so there is no need for a separate assembly instruction sheet and parts don’t need to be individually labeled and sorted” says Coelho.

Satellite images of Earth at night evoke ambiguous feelings: While on a ground level our cities appear as purely cultural artifacts, a traveler from outer space might just as well marvel at them as beautifully glowingorganic fungi-like structures that sprouted on our planet. Less than a millennium ago, the Earth at night was all dark. Today it is all glowing and blossoming.

Scientists think the laws governing the structure of galaxies in outer space are the same laws underlying the growth of cities. Henry Lin and Abraham Loeb at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics have used models for showing how galaxies evolve based on matter density to propose a unifying theory for scaling laws of human populations.

The next guest in our interview series is Chloé Rutzerveld, young talented and promising Food and Concept designer, from Eindhoven University of Technology. Chloé is interested in combining aspects of food, design, nature, culture and life sciences in a form of critical design. She uses food as a medium to address, communicate and discuss social, cultural or scientific issues.

Throughout 2014, Chloé worked on a 3D food printing project, titled Edible Growth, to show how high-tech or lab-produced food doesn’t have to be unhealthy, unnatural or not tasteful. Her concept is an example of a future food product fully natural, healthy, and sustainable.

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From food, to medicine, to material, it was plants that once guided human culture. Now that our culture is the most powerful force on the planet, how does it treat our green cousins? The Internet is awash with culture’s output, especially videos.

To recycle culture into fertilizer, the Raised on YouTube project aims to grow plants using only the dancing light and sound of algorithmically curated video.

Paris based artist and researcher Lia Giraud has created this green portrait. Nothing special you might think, until you realize it is alive: the green goo consist of microscopic algae.

The creation process is as follows: first algae are placed in a petri dish full of chemical nutrients. The algae are then exposed to an image and they will react to the light and form solids of different densities, forming an image. The procedure is very similar to a classic photo development, although this technique takes over four days to give life to the portrait.

When you don’t like your picture, you can just put it in the sun and it will turn into a beautiful even shade of green.

A team or Harvard researchers developed a self assembling swarm of 1000 robots that can form any shape. Inspired by flock behavior in old nature – think birds, fish or ants – the scientists created an algorithm that allows a flock of simple robots to assemble in any given shape.

The researchers expect that in the future such swarms of robots could help cleaning oil spills, provide immediate emergency help at a disaster site, or guide millions of self driving cars.

In the forest, plants struggle with each others to gain sunlight. Meanwhile in the ‘urban jungle’ we call cities, plants need to fight against tall buildings and skyscrapers in order to reach fresh air and sun rays.

Inspired by ‘The Vertical Farm’ by Dr. Dickson Despommier, Aprilli Design Studio conceptualized Urban Skyfarm as architectural solution that brings vegetation high up in the air and environmental improvement for food production and distribution.